


In Repose

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 12 Days of Carnivale, Cannibalism, Canonical Character Death, Ficlet, Gen, Hickey Being Hickey, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Missing Scene, The Briefest of Necrophilia Mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 10:09:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16993017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: Goodsir's fate is found out and mused over.





	In Repose

**Author's Note:**

> For the 12 Days of Carnivale prompt "a state of grace."

Goodsir looks beautiful in death. The body is fresh enough that if Hickey weren't so picky as to prefer a pulse he'd fuck it, but surely sticking one's prick into an imminent meal would also be bad table manners besides. Yet there is something simultaneously, alluringly, both post-coital and saintly about Harry Goodsir's corpse in repose, his clothes provocatively, infuriatingly neat right down to the symmetrically folded sleeves above the gaping gashes in his wrists, the thick wealth of his curls spread across the grease-stained pillow like a halo, the hazel glimmer of his sad cow's eyes still dewy and clear between his lashes. A martyr basking in his own sacrifice, his own purity. Orgasmic relief writ large across the rough-polished marble-still face.

Through a mortal sin, Goodsir seems to have attained for himself a state of grace. He's fled to where even Hickey can no longer reach him.

“Poor sod couldn't cut it,” Tozer remarks, under his breath. Were the wind flapping the tent canvas a little louder Hickey would not have heard it.

Hickey straightens from his nose-to-nose examination with Goodsir and props his hands on his hips. “Always was a sensitive soul,” says Hickey, putting upon a tone of quailing, syrupy remembrance. “With delicate sensibilities. And an even more delicate constitution.”

“That's... not how he struck me,” Tozer says, as though he cannot tell whether Hickey is being serious or not. As though he wants to defend Goodsir's stance on morals and practicals only now that he is dead.

Hickey smiles and passes his hand over Goodsir's face to shut his eyes. Lingering on the clammy visage. With his other hand he claps Tozer's shoulder. “He'd never've struck you,” he says. “He could've slit our throats in our sleep, or tried to, at least. Could've left like he said he so wanted to. Instead he's here. He stayed here, for us.”

“You're saying he _offed_ himself for _us?”_ Tozer says, his somber pity morphing into somber incredulity. He wears somberness more and more now. The grim of it all heavy on his once-proud shoulders. Sharp in his gaze when he glances sideways at Hickey, when he thinks that Hickey cannot see.

“He's ours now, either way,” Hickey says. When he shifts he can feel the dried pool of blood which has spread across the floor of the tent sticking to the soles of Fitzjames' boots. “Now help me haul him out where we can butcher him.”

Goodsir isn't even stiff yet as Hickey and Tozer drag him from the tent and set up the table, nor even as they strip him of his meticulously arranged clothes, popping the buttons of his waistcoat and scavenging his socks for themselves. Hickey himself undoes the neckerchief and sharply slides it from his collar with the soft rasp of fabric against fabric, with a final muted whipcrack snap as it comes free. He'll keep it as a memento, perhaps. Wipe his ass with it. The rest of the articles are strewn and crumpled into an ignominious pile, no more organized than the shale crunching underfoot.

Hickey remembers the little speech Goodsir had given when he'd balked at cutting up dear Billy, until Hickey had brandished the metaphorical switch. How, even during his act of defiance, when, with implacable, condescending gentleness, he'd flung Hickey's low birth into his face, he'd still assumed that Hickey'd had a mam.

What an odd innocence. How _loved_ he must have been as a child. Must have been cute. A charming, irrepressibly curious little tyke, sandwiched between boisterous siblings, secure beneath the stern eye of a providing, dutiful father, with daily meals on the table and a bright future expected of him.

The adorable, inquisitive, idealistic child is only so much meat in the end. His naked adult body is scrubbed clean and white as a fresh snowbank but for the plenitude of hair, stark black and matted and swirling; knockoff Ursa minor constellations. The beautiful illusion of saintliness banished in favor of base, organic reality. The snowy flesh parts into livid, mouthwatering red in the wake of the blade. Still warm enough to steam as it is laid intimately bare to the air.

The stove will singe the hair from that fine skin, curl the curls to ash. For a fanciful moment Hickey imagines biting into it raw, hirsute lily yielding beneath his woefully blunt canines, another human's hairs catching in his human teeth. Imagines sucking in the soul from Goodsir's husk just as the Tuunbaq would. As he will, from someone, someday soon.

Delicious, either way.

 

 


End file.
